The 21 Spanish missions stretching from San Diego to Sonoma have been emblematic of early California for centuries -- and have been the subject of reports for generations of grade schoolers. The Huntington Library announced Tuesday it will host an expansive exhibition of mission-related artifacts, featuring nearly 250 objects from 60 lenders across the United States, Mexico and Spain. "Junípero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions," which will run Aug. 17 to Jan. 6, coincides with the 300th anniversary of Serra's birth.

The John Arnholt Smith Hacienda, with its classic walled courtyard design, an olive orchard and an aviary, sits on what was once part of an early ranch. Handcrafted masonry, heavy timbers and wide corridors evoke the look of the California missions. Location: 760 Via Miguel, La Habra Heights 90631 Asking price: $3 million Year built: 1936 Architect: Cliff May House size: Four bedrooms, five bathrooms, 4,664 square feet Lot size: 2.4 acres Features: Library/study, wine cellar, breakfast area, service entrance, detached four-car garage, lawn, gardens, patios, swimming pool, mountain, city and ocean views About the area: Last year, 554 single-family homes sold in the 90631 ZIP Code at a median price of $425,000, according to DataQuick.

In "The Hidden Legacy of the Missions" (Sept. 13), as I traveled back and forth in time and space with Richard Rodriguez, it became apparent that his writing style is entertaining but not frivolous, instructive but not pedantic. My appreciation. Althea Kapur Woodland Hills

Besides being a man of faith, Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who founded nine California missions, is a tourist draw -- and perhaps not just in California. The resort isles of Mallorca and Ibiza are already tourist magnets among Spain's many destinations. Now, Spanish tourist officials are giving an extra push to promoting the attractions of those two Mediterranean isles, along with Menorca and Formentera , two of the smaller Balearic Islands. The promotion coincides with Serra's 300 th birthday on Sunday.

When the Taliban used dynamite, artillery shells and rocket launchers to destroy two ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan, there was an unanticipated bit of blowback. The 2001 attack on the Buddhas of Bamiyan also launched an Oakland-based effort to digitally preserve world historic sites, including, most recently, the missions of California. Using cutting-edge 3D scanning technology, crews from a nonprofit called CyArk have wedged themselves into seldom-seen spaces in four of the state's 21 missions, bouncing 50,000 laser beams a second off centuries-old timbers.

Junipero Serra is responsible for: a) the founding of the California missions; b) the conversion of the "mission" Indians; c) opening up the West for colonization ; d) the death of thousands of Indian people . This is not a trick question. And it's not from a classroom textbook. But, if the message of its four authors is heard, more and more people will choose "d" as the "most correct" answer.

The John Arnholt Smith Hacienda, with its classic walled courtyard design, an olive orchard and an aviary, sits on what was once part of an early ranch. Handcrafted masonry, heavy timbers and wide corridors evoke the look of the California missions. Location: 760 Via Miguel, La Habra Heights 90631 Asking price: $3 million Year built: 1936 Architect: Cliff May House size: Four bedrooms, five bathrooms, 4,664 square feet Lot size: 2.4 acres Features: Library/study, wine cellar, breakfast area, service entrance, detached four-car garage, lawn, gardens, patios, swimming pool, mountain, city and ocean views About the area: Last year, 554 single-family homes sold in the 90631 ZIP Code at a median price of $425,000, according to DataQuick.

Father Jerome Tupa is not a missionary, but he understands the urgency of a mission. As a Benedictine monk at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., he belongs to a Catholic order that emphasizes prayer and work within a religious community. During an artistic pilgrimage to all of California's 21 missions, he began to appreciate the work of his long-ago fellow traveler, Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan who launched the building of these churches, starting in 1769.

It's a scholastic rite of passage for every California fourth-grader: studying the history of the Spanish Catholic missions and the life of Father Junípero Serra. Steven W. Hackel remembers the drill. "We were taught that Father Serra was a good, gentle padre who built missions every one-day's horseback ride apart for tired travelers, as sort of like Motel 6's of the day," says Hackel, a UC Riverside associate professor of history and author of a new biography of Serra. "And there was nothing about Indians in those missions at all. " Finding the complex man of God wrapped inside the saintly myth and putting the missing indigenous Americans back into the picture, are lead objectives of an exhibition scheduled to open Aug. 17 at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens and run through Jan. 6. PHOTOS: Junipero Serra exhibition Titled "Junípero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions" and co-curated by Hackel and Catherine Gudis, also a UC Riverside associate professor of history, it's perhaps the most comprehensive exhibition ever assembled about the devout Franciscan friar who established nine of the 21 missions in present-day California and is sometimes called the state's "founding father.

Hidden in the padres' 200-year-old scrawlings at four California missions are the brief records of a native Californian, a woman depicted by the Spanish and even by her own people as a seductress, a sorceress and a witch--but by others as a freedom-fighter. Toypurina was no ordinary woman. She was a shaman, the daughter of a shaman and a co-leader in a revolt against the San Gabriel Mission in 1785.

It's a scholastic rite of passage for every California fourth-grader: studying the history of the Spanish Catholic missions and the life of Father Junípero Serra. Steven W. Hackel remembers the drill. "We were taught that Father Serra was a good, gentle padre who built missions every one-day's horseback ride apart for tired travelers, as sort of like Motel 6's of the day," says Hackel, a UC Riverside associate professor of history and author of a new biography of Serra. "And there was nothing about Indians in those missions at all. " Finding the complex man of God wrapped inside the saintly myth and putting the missing indigenous Americans back into the picture, are lead objectives of an exhibition scheduled to open Aug. 17 at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens and run through Jan. 6. PHOTOS: Junipero Serra exhibition Titled "Junípero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions" and co-curated by Hackel and Catherine Gudis, also a UC Riverside associate professor of history, it's perhaps the most comprehensive exhibition ever assembled about the devout Franciscan friar who established nine of the 21 missions in present-day California and is sometimes called the state's "founding father.

The 21 Spanish missions stretching from San Diego to Sonoma have been emblematic of early California for centuries -- and have been the subject of reports for generations of grade schoolers. The Huntington Library announced Tuesday it will host an expansive exhibition of mission-related artifacts, featuring nearly 250 objects from 60 lenders across the United States, Mexico and Spain. "Junípero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions," which will run Aug. 17 to Jan. 6, coincides with the 300th anniversary of Serra's birth.

When the Taliban used dynamite, artillery shells and rocket launchers to destroy two ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan, there was an unanticipated bit of blowback. The 2001 attack on the Buddhas of Bamiyan also launched an Oakland-based effort to digitally preserve world historic sites, including, most recently, the missions of California. Using cutting-edge 3D scanning technology, crews from a nonprofit called CyArk have wedged themselves into seldom-seen spaces in four of the state's 21 missions, bouncing 50,000 laser beams a second off centuries-old timbers.

A New York hedge fund manager's plan to demolish an eye-catching steel-and-glass home in Malibu and build a two-story California Mission-style residence has neighbors in a lather over the potential loss of ocean views and what some decry as the waste of a perfectly good house. Once described as among the most significant new structures in Malibu, the building slated for destruction was designed by architect Bart Prince and hugs the slope in a neighborhood of private tennis courts, swimming pools and lush lawns.

Reporting from San Juan Bautista, Calif. -- On the darkest day of the year, a hushed crowd in a dim church awaited a few minutes of sheer brilliance. It was just after dawn Wednesday, the day of the winter solstice. Outside the 200-year-old mission at the heart of tiny San Juan Bautista, Native American drummers sang, urging the sun to rise. Inside, dozens of parishioners rubbed the sleep from their eyes. A woman stood up and sang in cadences haunting and solemn — phrases in no known tongue, she said, but "the language of the heart.

Psst. That coffee cup in your hand. Where will you toss it? Trash bin? Recycling bin? What about the little white bag that has a few grease spots from your Mexican restaurant chips? And what happens to those utensils labeled "biodegradable" you bought for a family picnic? Where should you put plastic grocery bags? The choice of black, blue or green bin is meant to be simple. As the director of the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, Enrique Zaldivar, said, if it's not easy, it doesn't work.

Besides being a man of faith, Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who founded nine California missions, is a tourist draw -- and perhaps not just in California. The resort isles of Mallorca and Ibiza are already tourist magnets among Spain's many destinations. Now, Spanish tourist officials are giving an extra push to promoting the attractions of those two Mediterranean isles, along with Menorca and Formentera , two of the smaller Balearic Islands. The promotion coincides with Serra's 300 th birthday on Sunday.

INSPIRED BY English renditions of old buildings, Roberto Eduardo chose missions as his subject because "they are the only thing in the state of California of antiquity. I don't do them cutesy with windows and lights," he says of his miniature California missions. Each of the seven-inch-tall missions is hand-cast and -painted and retails for $100 for a production model, $225 for a signed, limited-edition model.

Nicolas Berggruen is the kind of man who, like the White Queen in Wonderland, not only can believe six impossible things before breakfast but has the means and the drive to nudge them into reality. The descriptor "billionaire" is invariably attached to his name, as are the famous facts that he is "homeless" by choice -- no house, just an art collection in storage and a jet to get him from hotel to hotel on his point-to-point work for Berggruen Holdings, his private investment company, and for the other, civic-minded causes that take up his time and his money.

U.S. Border Patrol agents seized more than $500,000 in marijuana stuffed into a sport utility vehicle on Interstate 5 near San Clemente. An agent patrolling the area Wednesday afternoon spotted the 2002 Toyota Sequoia with what appeared to be excessive weight in its cargo area, Border Patrol officials said in a statement, noting that there was so much weight it was "affecting the vehicle's driving performance." When the agent pulled over the driver near the Oso Parkway exit in Mission Viejo, he saw bundles of marijuana inside.